Posts from — April 2010

It’s fairly common knowledge that Google’s search bots love WordPress blogs. Whether or not you actually implement any SEO (search engine optimization)strategies for your blog, using a WordPress blog will most likely get you more natural traffic than the other platforms such as Blogger and Typepad. If you do use WordPress, there are lots of great plugins that can help optimize your pages and give your SEO standing a boost. In this post I list 2 specific SEO plugins, although I hope to follow up regularly with other valuable plugins in the future.

All in One SEO Pack – This super popular plugin is streamlined for some of the best SEO practices on WordPress. It helps you optimize your titles, descriptions and keywords, as well as avoid duplicate content issues.

SEO Tag Cloud Widget – If you have a tag cloud, which for SEO purposes I suggest you do, this plugin will display the tag cloud in a SEO-friendly way, using html markup.

Getting your blog ranked on the search engines can be a long process, but small changes like these can help you get “Google Love” faster.

This is it. You are on your own – no longer an employee, but a small business owner or a freelancer. It’s exciting and scary at the same time. Finally, you get to do all things you wanted to and fulfill your dreams. On the other hand, job security gets a whole new meaning.

There are many advantages about being a business owner, and some disadvantages, as well.  Here’s a quick look at what to expect.

Pros

1. You are your own boss - No more annoying authoritative figure that hovers over you all day long. No need to pretend you respect a person that’s a total failure. No one to boss you around but yourself.
2. Flexible time - You set your own meetings, there’s not set time in which you need to get up and get to the office, and you can decide when you’ve had enough work for the day.
3. No office politics and quarrels - No more fighting about where to go to lunch, or what music you can hear in the open space. You are now master of your domain and get to decide how things are done.
4. Lower expenses - If you are working from home, which a lot of small business owners are, then you save a lot of money on commuting, eating out and formal clothing.
5. Choosing your clients – As an employee in a company, you pretty much take the clients given to you, no questions asked. As a business owner, you get to choose those you want to work with. You can even choose NOT to work with a specific client, if you consider them to be too much trouble.

Cons

1. Income isn’t a sure thing - When you were on a salary, paid by someone else, you basically knew how much you earned each month, and could plan your budget accordingly. As a freelance or a small business owner, income depends on the amount of projects you have and your own marketing efforts. Being independent means that you have periods of feast or famine, and you have to be prepared for that.
2. The work day is never really over - Although your time is much more flexible now, you can still find yourself working late hours and answering phone calls on the weekends. You will find yourself thinking about work and projects a lot more than when you were an employee.
3. You can’t slack around - There’s no one to take the blame for you when a project isn’t finished on time. You have to have a work discipline and finish your tasks on time – and there’s no one to tell you to do that. It’s not easy to avoid distractions and procrastination, but you have to do it anyway.
4. Bureaucracy -  Meet the authorities! Now you don’t have a choice and you have to deals with aspects of bureaucracy you’ve never met before. Hiring an accountant or a lawyer might help, but you can’t always afford it and many times you’ll have to deal with the authorities yourself.
5. You can’t stop marketing yourself - It’s not easy to sell yourself, but you have to do it. Basically, you have to do it all the time, because you need to make sure you have a constant flow of projects to insure an income. A lot of people find this task problematic and difficult. There are many ways to market yourself these days, with the help of the internet, and it’s easier than it used to be. Still, you can’t stop marketing yourself when you own your own business.